Rekha Raghunathan earned MBA from the University of Hartford, CT, USA with a specialisation in financial analytics. She has been a part of the Word Lab at IIHS since January 2015, and works with the faculty and researchers to establish and help implement editorial processes across all IIHS teams for in-house publications, working papers, reports and policy briefs. Her focus areas include converting research material into data stories and op-eds for online platforms and non-academic audiences, and doing substantive and copy-editing on several IIHS publications. She conducts writing workshops for external and internal audiences, and teaches writing skills as part of the Urban Fellows Programme.

Prior to IIHS, she ran the India Water Portal, a programme of the NGO Arghyam, managing a team of subject matter experts and journalists in the water/sanitation sector. She was instrumental in the overall content planning and establishing of media collaborations. She has also been Consulting Editor with EMBARQ (World Resources Institute) and other global NGOs and think tanks. Earlier, she worked with Chillibreeze Solutions and managed a team that wrote on various topics including legal, medical, business and other disciplines. Articles edited by Rekha have been published in The Hindu, EPW, Scroll.in, The Wire and IndiaSpend among other print and online media channels.

She loves to read, blog, and play tennis and basketball. Her personal work has been published by Huffington Post, The Ladies Finger, India Water Portal and Madras Courier.